After reading this article when it was posted in 2022 and the author's other post on particulates[0] I bought the sqair[1], which we are very happy with. Allergies and morning congestion are nearly 0 after using it. We live on a very busy road so I run it all the time and with the carbon filter as well. I would like to get a second one eventually -- it only cleans 430 sqft of air and our condo is 730.
I personally own a 1008-DH, which has much better filtration than the 1512 reviewed there.
Previous reviews at The Sweet Home also analyzed IQAir, which is probably even better as it filters particles down to ~0.1 microns. I'd love to see an unbiased review testing ultra-small particles.
I bought sqair from https://smartairfilters.com/en/ and it's same principle. One of them keeps my 700sq ft village flat clean. First year my daughter doesn't need doses of siflex at night.
Can with a HEPA filter is good either as proven by an article shared on HN about 6 months back.
I've owned a bunch of air filters but I like the IQAir ones the best. IQAir machines are built around a very heavy-duty prefilter that traps all the hair, dust, and large particles (maybe pollen-size?). The HEPA filter thus only gets a stream of tiny particles, so it lasts quite a while. Other models I've used (Plasmacluster, Rabbitair) do fine with brand-new filters but quickly accumulate dust that you have to vacuum out, and even then, the HEPA filter is probably already ruined. They also aren't sealed as well, so you don't get to hold up your particle counter to the exhaust and see a nice "0". (But the particle count in the room does decrease versus not running them, so they do do something.)
The IQAir machines don't need any maintenance other than buying new filters when it tells you to. If you are trying to save money, don't buy IQAir.
I try to evaluate effectiveness qualitatively and quantitatively. When I first got an air filter for my bedroom, I noticed that suddenly I didn't feel like coughing all night long. When I got the IQAir for my bedroom, I woke up the next morning with a sore throat because the back of my throat was totally dry. My chronic post-nasal drip was gone. It could have been my imagination, so I bought a laser particle counter to measure the particle count in my room. It was 0. (And it's counting the sub-micron particles.)
(There are some caveats. Moving around in bed is particle city, so you're not breathing 100%-fresh air all night. But the filters take care of things very quickly, and I run them on a high setting, and they're close to my bed. You'll need earplugs. Air filters on the "silent" setting do approximately nothing. This was not a problem for me because I've slept with earplugs for years due to annoying cats. Now I can't sleep without them, the sound of sheets moving against each other is annoying :)
How do you think their standalone purifiers, like the IQAir Health Pro Plus, compare to the smaller Blueair Blue Pure 211+?
The article measured a CADR on the Blue Pure of 325cfm, while some hits on Google show a CADR rating of 300 cfm for the IQAir one. I'm mainly interested in filtering pet hair, allergens, viruses and SLA 3D printing smells.
Thanks for being very specific about your environment and use patterns.
I think a lot depends on how air naturally flows through your apartment. In my case, I doubt one purifier would suffice even for the ~60m² we live in, as I can already tell we have at least four different "zones" that don't want to exchange air unless forced to (e.g. by running the AC fans to stir things up) - I can tell by observing how heat and smells move. It's something that I believe could be corrected, but I need to find a HVAC specialist (or learn enough myself) for it[0]. In the meantime, I want to monitor the air quality parameters in all those zones separately, to quantify both how much stuff accumulates in each, and how bad the circulation actually is.
> After I got the Mila, there was a noticeable difference in the amount of dust that collected all over the house on a regular basis. I can see it in the filter sock, which I take outside and regularly clean as well.
I very much hope to get that effect. I'm allergic to dust mites, and my children most likely are too (observing them seems to hint at it, but they're too young for it to show up on tests), and I hope that adding air purifiers with HEPA filters will help reduce the household cleaning workload a bit.
Anyway, I've looked at Mila website, and I'm torn. On the one hand, even if pricey, it's nicely designed and tick the right boxes. Two filters, including the carbon one that seems actually loaded with carbon instead of just pretending. On the other hand, they condemn other vendors for bullshit marketing... and then literally do the same thing. Don't know what to think of that.
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[0] - There's an extra constraint here in that it's an apartment in a block of flats that's been designed primarily for natural/"gravity" ventilation. I've been explicitly told by the HOA operating it that I absolutely cannot put fans into existing grilles and ventilate mechanically, as it will mess up the airflow for the whole building.
We live in the city and always are struggling with allergies. The whole family is always coughing or sneezing. We bought a xiaomi air purifier like in the article last week, started using it in the bedrooms for a few hours in the evening, and the allergies cleared up overnight. The particulate sensor is mostly useless, a known problem with the xiaomi models, but running it at a fixed setting seems to clean the air quite effectively.
From personal experience I run a high quality filter in my bedroom. In september we had serious (just straight up hazardous) air quality issues and you couldn't even appreciably detect smoke in my room or the nearby rooms. Walking outdoors felt like wandering into a cigar bar.
Personal recommendations for the IQAir brand, and hearsay discussion that Austin Air also makes good products. Costs about $120-$180 a year, worth every penny.
During fire season this year, living in one of the cities with the worst air quality in Canada this year, I had to double up my fans to keep up when it reaches 400+ US pm2.5 aqi in my home office that is about 300 sq ft. I am using filtrete 1900 20x20x1 from amazon (Canada)
I also have a Dyson air cleaner and it works for moderate to light smoke but it's just not enough for heavy smoke.
Not OP but I've also researched this topic and settled on an iqair filter back when I lived in China. I did borrow a particle monitor and the drop in the number of particle was flagrant when turning it on.
Subjectively it also did a lot to improve the air in the house... I'm not sure that something like an iqair is needed in a place that isn't as polluted as China (we sold our air filter when we moved out)
It is pretty difficult to filter out ultra fine particles anyway and some of the best air purifiers can claim to do a lot. Obviously, you will be breathing that stuff every day and unless the air around you is seriously affecting your health, you don't need a high end air purifier. This is my opinion, but unless you have allergies or asthma, most top of the line air filtration systems won't have much of an impact on your day to day and I would personally suggest any $250-$500 range air purifier. This content in this article[1] does a really good job at comparing air purifiers but they suggest an ionizer which can have negative effects.
Things to look out for:
- No ionizer.
- No uv light.
- True HEPA is fine but if they've trademarked or registered their HEPA brand (HyperHEPA, HEPASilent), I would ask them more about what that means and they should provide a pretty good answer within the context.
I currently live on an arterial road, about 2 blocks from a major Interstate (I-5).
I'm very concerned about air pollution. Pollution here (Seattle, Downtown / Capitol Hill area) is bad enough I can see it in the form of black dust which comes in even through closed windows. And that's just the particles big enough to see.
I placed 4 HEPA filters throughout the house, and I run them constantly on a low setting. Based on square footage, I would only need 1-2 of these filters. But I wanted extra filter capacity in each main room.
One annoyance is that my particle counter returns a particle count (per cubic meter, I think?) which doesn't have an exact conversion to the standardized AQI (Air Quality Index). I found a plausible conversion guide, surely not exact but close enough.
Here's what I learned:
- Indoor air filters make a dramatic improvement to air quality. When the outdoor particle count is ~1M, my indoor count can be well under 100K. That's 90% reduction.
– When I approximate AQI, it's common for outdoor air (https://cfpub.epa.gov/airnow/index.cfm) to be in the "Moderate" scale, and my indoor air to be at the floor (best) of "Healthy".
– My other air filters are still effective, even though they don't get the particle count down to zero. They are the RabbitAir minusa2, and two Blueair Classic 205 units.
I was also very surprised when I carried the particle counter around my neighborhood. The quiet streets often have worse air quality than the arterial! And the particle count on the arterial was just as bad as on the Interstate 5 overpass. I think the better airflow on the arterials may help get the pollution out of the area. I really expected the quite streets to have fewer pollution particles.
I have not ventured into testing for C02, other gasses, or Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). But I'm very curious and may try to measure that myself someday soon.
I completely agree. Recently purchased an air filter and it was a ridiculous amount of work to find a quality product. Even the supposedly data driven blogs didn't post the lower cost options, probably because of affiliate revenues on the high end models.
Besides the PM2.5 aspect (which, as far as I can tell, can be solved by pushing a large volume of air through a HEPA filter), there's also the quality and type of the carbon filter, which is what traps a number of other things such as VOCs and most scents. You also need to know the type of thing you're filtering - smoke, for example, you really need a carbon filter for, and if you really want to filter a decent quantity of smoke, you'll need to drastically oversize the filter (e.x. Get a large industrial filter for a small area.) In case anyone's curious what I got, I didn't need to filter smoke, so I got one of the larger Levoit filters and used it in a small room, and I'm happy so far.
I've done so much research about air purifiers that I think I could do a thesis if I were in academia. The vast majority of these devices fall under one category: rubbish. Lots of gimmicks performed when it comes to efficacy. Bending reality with borderline claims or inventing useless terms that mean nothing.
If you are serious about indoor air quality, start with IQAir. Their products are bulky, contain multiple filters and you know that you'll be able to get replacement filters 5 years later.
Blueair has some reasonable products too (ignore the smaller, cheap product lines).
One of my cats, who's since passed away, was asthmatic. Air purifiers throughout the house and a motion activated box fan plus furnace filter near the litterboxes resulted in an immediate and noticeable improvement in his quality of life. I've noticed a similar improvement in my own health.
I've since ended up with a variety of air cleaners:
* IKEA FÖRNUFTIG[0] is a small and relatively quiet unit. It can be wall-mounted, so it can take up virtually no space. The unit is reasonably priced. Filters are cheap.
* IKEA STARKVIND[1] is a much larger unit (also available in end table form[2] to save space), but also relatively quiet on the lower speeds. It's an interesting unit - integrates into Home Assistant (the unit speaks Zigbee), and has a PM2.5 air quality sensor. This unit is a lot more expensive than the FÖRNUFTIG, but the filters are reasonably priced.
* The box fan plus single furnace filter is incredibly noisy, but really good at dealing with cat litter dust. There is a huge range of price/quality when it comes to filters[, I just use the cheaper ones since I'm focusing on large dust particles.
* I have a couple of units that use Bionaire aer1 filters[3]. The units I have are quiet and reasonably sized, though they get louder as the filter fills up. The filters are expensive, and one of the units takes two of them which doesn't help matters. There is a variety of filters available.
There's a huge spectrum of tradeoffs between noise, size of the unit, filtration effectiveness, replacement filter cost, and extra features. I'm not convinced I've found the sweet spot yet.
There are plenty of good products out there that are basically a fan with a HEPA filter and an activated charcoal filter. Even at fairly low airflow it does continously filter the entire room air, and can radically reduce particle counts within half an hour.
1. CADR is really low to the point where the unit is near useless due to #2
2. In addition to a low CADR, it has the highest noise. It looks and sounds like a jet engine when you have this thing on high, which is needed due to the low CADR. This is the loudest air purifier that I’ve ever owned
3. If you get a defective main filter, the unit will emit an unpleasant metallic smell. I haven’t tested the particles yet but I doubt the air is clean.
4. Unlike other smart air cleaners in the same price range, it’s app and smart features don’t work. You can’t even create a schedule for it
I have one and it felt nice, unfortunately because people smoke in the building I live I can't use it since the smell collects in the filter very quickly and they are expensive (but last a long time if not for the smell). A bunch of carbon could help with that but a) I try to avoid stuff from low wage countries as the carbon is (but not the rest of that particular air purifier as far as I could tell) and b) hopefully I can just move in the not extremely distant future.
There are a few others as well, look for the better quality filters ("SuperHEPA" as AirPura calls them). As I understand it, the small particles are the ones that aggrivate allergies the most and that is exactly what the higher quality filters are better at. Only a relatively few companies have those better filters, IQAir is another one. It turns out the name HEPA doesn't mean anything for consumer filters, you need to look at the specs.
[0]: https://dynomight.net/air/#things-that-create-particles-indo...
[1]: https://smartairfilters.com/en/product/sqair-air-purifier/
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